Cleverness In Pop

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Do you appreciate what I'm going to call 'cleverness' - wordplay, allusion, non-standard structures, etc. - in pop music? Is it something you look for? Who does it well?

Do you think there's an opposition between cleverness and directness (in emotional or physical impact)? Should pop be cleverer?

(Qn arising from today's Popular entry)

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I'm already unhappy w/the question by the way - "non-standard structures" is a very broad and vague thing to put under this umbrella!

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I find this very difficult to answer BUT if you'd asked me five years ago I would have instantly said YES IT ARE GREAT and showed you my entire collection of David Devant memorabilia. Now I like my pop music to be fun, or gorgeous, or boshingly nasty, or vapidly catchy.

I think my shift in attitude was 50% due to the high saturation of the wrong sort of 'clever' on the London indie circuit 2003-5 where I saw that most people trying to pull off clever a) weren't b) were complete d1cks. The other 50% was that I grew up a bit and realised I wasn't cleverer than the entire world (i.e. I stopped being a student/ex-student and started the rest of my life). Plus, as the Lex says, I can't bear people like Calvin Harris shoving it my face saying 'LOOK IT'S THE 80S DO YOU SEE!!!!' I guess some memes get old very quickly.

[koganbot]

Another Dylan example, full of allusions but still a brutal power punch:

Cinderella she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo he's moanin',
"You belong to me, I believe,"
And someone says, "You're in the wrong place, my friend.
You better leave."
And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweepin' up
On Desolation Row

Of course, when aped by hundreds of non-Dylans, stuff like this becomes insufferable.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

I shall save my detailed personal response to 10cc for the Popular comments box, although in my view they are one band who did 'clever' very well.

I think one big thing in their favour was that the subject matter of their songs was often surprising - and this offset the smartarse wordplay nicely. It took me so long to get my head round the idea that someone would write a song about prison riot-control or plane crashes or blackmail or a revenge-of-the-nerds-style fantasy or voodoo or arms-smuggling or white guys in trouble with the locals in Jamaica or whatever that, by the time I realised I don't know what the right pop vocabulary is for that sort of song, I also realised that 10cc's would do as well as any.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

The one problem with wordplay is that when it fails, my KILL EVERYONE alarm starts to go off. I will never let Aly and AJ off the hook for confusing sums and quotients. I blame the parents. (Parents just don't understand math. <--allusion)

Are you now or have you ever been a They Might Be Giants fan?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I was for a bit! They were a clever band alright. The key problem with them wasn't their wordplay, it was the way they emphasised the wordplay with a nasal voice and an accordion.

The Magnetic Fields are the They Might Be Giants it's OK to like.

is there an opposition between cleverness and directness (in emotional or physical impact)?

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

This isn't quite answering the intended question, I suspect, but here's an example of a writing partnership where the opposition is frequently set up within the song itself, viz John/Taupin songs of the 70s

The way they work basically is - Bernie writes a lyric, Elton sets it to music. In the early days Elton never knew what he was going to get before it was handed to him, and Bernie didn't often stint on the allusion and metaphor. He was often cryptic to the point of obtuseness in fact. That memorable and moving pop songs were created out of some of these lyrics seems little short of miraculous to me. But equally they wouldn't be half so affecting without the element of impenetrableness.

cleverness zones

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

it all depends on your stance with the source of the cleverness dunnit. one man's clever is another man's pretentious. (so far so obvious). also obv - it takes intense clever to be the best kind of simple and direct. but pop's cleverness might be concentrated in the non-musical marketing stuff. in the styling of a band, the 'stance' of the band. costello and the police pretending to be new wave, the spice girls papier-mache feminism, indie bands blathering authenticity, teenpop or emo 'everyman'. the ones that fool most of the people most of the time, that's clever.

Guess I'm gonna have to tell 'em that I got no cerebellum

[koganbot]

The Ramones own this category.

Should I take a chance on her?
One bullet in the cylinder

A line from the teen-yearning songbook, followed by a gag that takes its razor and reveals an unmendable tear in the teen universe. (A "tear" as in a "rip," though I suppose it can also be a broken teardrop, one that can't be repaired.)

The Kinks, Mothers, Beefheart, Alice Cooper, B-52s, Devo would all be relevant here.

Don't know if this is an example or a counterexample, but Margaret Berger's "Robot Song": seems as if it was conceived as a funny novelty for the pop market, "I'm in love with a robot," the lyrics a lampoon of all those teen songs that say "our parents/our world will not understand our love." Then of course you want to give it a pretty melody, but what happens, incredibly - well, maybe not incredibly, happens in Europop all the time - is that the melody isn't just pretty, it's insanely beautiful and poignant, several aches of beauty beyond "achingly beautiful." So the outer-space effects and robot blips are genuinely haunting, "You're the only one who makes me feel a thing" drifting into an unattainable distance, another place, another time, another world. Almost as moving as the Shangri-Las, the doomed love of "Out In The Streets" and "Leader Of The Pack."

[infov0re.livejournal.com]

Gosh, this is beginning to make me think of a post about emo I meant to write ages ago. There's a lot of interesting wordplay and shifting perspective in some of the MCR and FOB I've been listening to recently. Some of it is a bit DO YOU SEE. Some of it is quite nice. There's a whole essay in Fall Out Boy's use of "he/him" as a universal antagonist.

Re TMBG/TMF - I add "Fountains of Wayne" to the bottom of that pile.

Re: structure; I'm always noticing odd structure in songs. It's about the single thing left I like in the Fratellis' "Chelsea Dagger": the song is basically verse/bridge/verse/bridge/chorus/chorus. Which is unusual, to say the least.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

LOL! Creme
MAO! Godley

(sorry, it felt inevitable)

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

I wuv the clever, and indeed the "clever", very very much. It can totally turn off all other quality criteria for me when in effect.

Actually I recall using the exact words "clever = brilliant" in an old ilm post about The Divine Comedy's "If", which has clever wordplay going on on different timescales: the bit that was quoted in reviews etc was the couplet "If you were attacked, I would kill for you / If your name was Jack, I'd change mine to Jill for you" -- lovely doublerhyme -- while the thing that floored me were the lines "If you were a dog, I'd feed you scraps from off the table" & "If you were a horse, I'd clean the crap out of your stable", which also has lovely doublerhyme, yet appear in different verses!

It's probably connected to my love of puzzles, quizzes, cryptics etc; the discovery of a hidden something buried by the artist (which can happen by eg musical allusion as well as wordplay) giving me a hit of pleasure -- and I must admit that this pleasure is totally selfcongratulatory in the "ooh amn't I clever too!" way.

Kinda related: There was another old ilm thread about The Monochrome Set, where (if I remember correctly) Tom said that a thing which hindered him from getting into them was that they were "too droll" -- which actually led to me checking them out further. I suppose one could approximate the connection by droll : clever :: delivery : content? I also think that the "droll" dimension is the one that has really been ruined the most by bad britpop rather than the "clever", though it is not always easy to distinguish them from each other.

Also, erm, Carter USM.

[http://users.livejournal.com/xyzzzz__/]

There should be a thread about "stupidity in pop" sometime - is there an appreciation of this?